The Eastern Caribbean increasingly faces maritime threats from transnational criminal organizations, raising maritime law enforcement to crucial importance. Criminal networks take advantage of the region’s porous borders to traffic illicit firearms, drugs, and people. A regional strategy to build criminal justice systems, disrupt the production and trafficking of illicit drugs, and minimize the impact of transnational organized criminal networks is required. The member states of the Regional Security System (RSS)—including Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent and the Grenadine—need a unified operational approach for confronting maritime crime that fully addresses all operational, training, leadership, and international coordination planning needs.

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In the aftermath of Tunisia’s transition to democratic rule, senior female law enforcement officers created the Tunisian League of Women Police (TLWP), Tunisia’s first women’s police association, to promote the role of women in law enforcement, provide professionalization opportunities for its members, and further the provision of democratic security in Tunisia. By working to enhance the representation of women in Tunisia’s security forces, the TLWP supports the reform efforts of the Government of Tunisia and the Tunisian Ministry of Interior to improve security provision for all Tunisians.

The United States and its allies continue to struggle with how to design and deliver programs that achieve their intended outcome in the short term and provide lasting impacts in the long term. SCG has learned from engaging with policymakers, planners, and program managers that inflexible funding authorities, urgent security and front office priorities, programmatic stovepipes, and uneven donor and interagency coordination hamper sustainable strategic capacity building. Many planners and program managers have never been trained on program design or provided with the proper tools to implement a sustainable and strategic capacity building approach.

Building trust in public institutions remains a challenge in Liberia. Internal security organizations like the Liberian National Police (LNP) are working to learn new skills and effectively respond to threats without instilling fear within communities. The LNP needs the tools and skills to better communicate with the public about their mission and the constraints they face in meeting that mission. Building the LNP capacity for positive messaging and information dissemination is essential to fostering trust within the communities they serve.

Among the many ways that service provision can be improved in countries transitioning from democratic rule is to strengthen how the police investigate themselves, hold their officers accountable, and incentivize model service provision. Although Tunisia’s Ministry of Interior has undertaken numerous initiatives to reform service provision since the country’s transition to democratic rule nearly a decade ago, the General Inspection Offices for the National Police and National Guard have human, institutional, and technical capacity gaps that their leaderships are seeking to address. Human capacity constraints limit the number of cases that the General Inspection Offices are able to investigate, and investigators are keen to learn new skills in line with international standards and best practices.

The Caribbean’s geographic location makes it a strategic transit point for regional and international crime networks to conduct a wide range of illicit activities, including extortion, kidnapping, murder, money laundering, and trafficking. Countries in the region face challenges conducting criminal investigations. A lack of resources, training, and standard operating procedures makes it difficult to effectively collect and use forensic evidence in criminal proceedings, which impacts conviction rates.